By invitation of General MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Occupation Forces , an American education mission, headed by Dr. George D. Stoddard, President of the University of Illinois, visited Japan to study the linguistic and the educational situation of the country. Among other things, the mission recommended the complete abolition of the Chinese characters and the adoption of the Roman alphabet for writing Japanese, a change then considered as fundamental to the future progress and civilization of the country. It was in such a context that the English âJapanese Dictionary in Romaji i by Tokinobo Mihara was carefully compiled. The Chinese characters were not abandonned but the orthography of written Japanese changed radically by the official adoption of a small set of official characters , the tooyoo kanji. The Romaji became nowithstanding an integral part of the Japanese writing system . Dictionaries as this by Mihara are an absolute necessity for foreigns learning the language alone.

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